Meanwhile, On Another Planet...

The Alabama bureau leads a much different life than we here at Underbelly Central:

I sent three big calves to the sale yesterday so I'm hearing a lot of mooing today from sad mama cows...

Sometimes it can be a problem separating the calves going to the sale from the rest of the herd -- bull, other calves and their mamas, but it worked out real well. The main thing is to keep them calm. I pen them up in the area where i feed them. Then, I man a gate while Billy, who hauls them to the sale for me, and my ex brother in law, Jim, try to send the bull, mama cows, and calves not going to the sale, toward the gate. At the same time, they try to keep the calves going to the sale away from the gate. when that's done, We run the ones headed to the sale through the barn, which
opens from the feeding pen, into Billy's cattle trailer. if things dont work out right, they can all go through or over fences or through that gate.

Mama cows whose calves went to the sale yesterday will bawl for three days or so. ...

What made it especially interesting is while all that was going on yesterday morning, the bull was trying to breed one of the cows. That is something you don't want to interfere with or get in the way of. He was on her while I was still manning the gate as the other cows and the little calves not going to the sale were coming out.

Maybe this is what Rebecca West had in mind when she said that "Ladies are more accustomed to not being amused than gentlemen seem to realize."

Johnson v. Delay

Last week I laid on a bit of snark about Lyndon Johnson and Tom Delay (link). Underbelly’s Alabama bureau, drawing on long experience ‘tweendecks in Washington, weighs in:

Seems to me comparing Delay with LBJ doesn’t work because one was using presidential power while the other was using house position power. Different powers. If the comparison was to LBJ as Senate leader and Delay as House leader I'm sure there are comparisons. But LBJ was noted for bringing in everyone he could to work a deal -- civil rights legislation, for instance -- and Delay's tactic was to freeze the Dems out -- out of conferences when final versions are written, for instance. … Delay gloated when he cut a fellow Republican’s nuts, LBJ didn’t get pleasure out of damaging a Democrat.

Recommended Reading from the Alabama Bureau

Still snarled up in snuff, so I turn the mike over to the Alabama bureau to offer up a bit of recommended reading:

Hi all -- if anyone needs more reasons why we ought to be leaving Iraq there are plenty in the March 26 New Yorker, in an article by George Packer titled "Betrayed -- the Iraqi translators who helped America." There were probably many good people there from State and a few other agencies and departments trying to do what they saw as right. but almost always the good guys were run over by weirdos, freaks, zealots, psychos supervised by tunnel vision bureaucrats, and top administrators like Bremer and Negroponte and Khalilzad didnt involve themselves in straightening out situations at low levels where the work gets done.

Unnerving report. It ought to be read word for word on the House and Senate floors and ought to be the basis of hearings on why we "lost" Iraq. The Bush administration lost the war the troops won, not Democrats trying to prevent more loss and more failure.

Comment: Might be a good companion to this Masterpiece of Self-Deception, from John McCain, via CNN, via Carpetbagger.